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Category Archives: NHL

Back when Destiny came out, my friends and I were extremely excited because it was being made by Bungie. When it released we put in tons of hours on it and played it for months. A lot of my friends continued to play it for months after I stopped playing and I would frequently return to team up with my friends to play again. Now we’re just a few days away from the console release of Destiny 2 and I’m excited to play it the same way I played the first Destiny and put in a ton of hours with my buddies.

The PC open BETA is happening right now, so if you want to check it out I highly recommend it. I never played the first one on PC, I played mainly on PS4, but since my PC has been upgraded since then I decided to give the open BETA a try. Now I could easily use a controller to play on PC, but I wanted to get the full experience and decided to use keyboard and mouse. The KB/Mouse combo is usually the preferred method for most gamers, especially when playing FPS games. I have to say, it had me questioning my PS4 controller, because the mouse and keyboard felt extremely smooth. The opening story mission was fluid after I changed a couple keybindings to make it more comfortable for me and PvP took me a while to get used to, but I eventually got it down(KingComplex is my tag).

Destiny was both a great PvE and PvP experience, so if you enjoy FPS games and never took the plunge to check out the first Destiny, you should at least consider checking out the new one. It’s going to be great!

Twitch Re-Branding:

My old Twitch account was SynthroLives. A nod to my book series, A Soldier’s Crest. I was originally planning to livestream my writing process, but then I never got to it. It’s a hard thing to do, because new viewers won’t know what part you’re up to in the story and you would constantly be trying to catch people up. It’s not very engaging, or at least not engaging in the right way. So, I had to decide not to do that. However, I didn’t want to abandon the livestreaming idea completely and until I figure out a way to incorporate my book series into this adventure, I will instead switch my focus to the most popular thing on Twitch. Streaming video games.

My biggest problem with Twitch has always been my own inconsistencies. I would stream for an hour here, or some random game there, or often pick games that way too many people are going to be playing and I wouldn’t get any viewers for it anyway. The only success I’ve had streaming came in the form of NHL 17. I was mainly doing giveaways and posting about it on Reddit which definitely helped, but it was drawing in the wrong crowd. People who would just tune in to get something out of it and people that were willing to try to scam me and my legitimate viewers out of prizes. It worked well for a few nights and brought in a lot of followers and views, but it wasn’t the crowd I wanted so I stopped and didn’t stream NHL again.

I’ve had time to reevaluate a lot of things. The most important being that most people who find success in livestreaming are actually pretty skilled gamers or at least skilled at certain games. The only video game I have ever felt I was actually good at is the NHL series of games. I don’t know what it is about them, but I don’t get nervous in clutch situations and I always feel like I know the right move to make and what to do in any given situation. So, I’m going to revisit the idea of streaming the NHL video games, but without the giveaway factor.

That’s where the re-brand comes in. I had this idea for a side story that may or may not have been cannon within the Soldier’s Crest Universe where my characters would be reincarnated in the far-off future as hockey players. Vallick Halstar, the main character of my first book, would still be the star but under a slightly different name. That name was Val Starlight. I don’t know why, but I think it’s a really interesting, catchy and cool name. So I’m using it for the basis of this re-branding on my Twitch account.

I’ll stream Destiny 2 when it drops, but I don’t expect much from that. When NHL 18 drops on September 15th, I’ll be going all in. If you want to follow so you can get notifications when I start doing that, just head over to Twitch.tv/Val_Starlight and give me a follow. I hope you join me for the streams!

The “30K” Club:

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering what the 30k Club is referring to in the title. I posted a youtube video with a trick to help beat the Lich King in Hearthstone’s new expansion The Frozen Throne about a week ago. The video shot up to almost 10k views in just a few hours. It was the first day of the week 3 boss battle against the Lich King and I guess I got lucky by posting the first helpful strat for the Mage class and the video blew up more than I ever imagined it would. As of this post, the video now has 27,852 views! So not only did we reach the 10k club, but we also reached the 20k and then some club. Combined with the views of my other videos, my Youtube channel now almost has 30k views. If you happen upon this blog post, please help me reach 30k by going over to ASC Gaming and checking out the videos. Thanks to everyone that watched, commented, liked, subscribed and shared. It has been a really cool experience and I look forward to uploading more videos! My next one should release tomorrow and I’m planning to release a bunch of Destiny 2-related videos next week.